Tag: Minimum Wage

Trouble With Reservations: How the Biden administration created a national labor crises

This was a hectic Holiday season for me, with many more social engagements than usual.  It’s usually pretty busy, but something happened this year that I have never seen before, and that is I had much trouble booking reservations for dinner engagements, which was very strange.   Because I am usually busy with this kind of thing during November and December, I have a base to say that this year differs from other years.  And that the occurrences were higher than usual indicates that statistically, we’re not dealing with an accident here, but statistical certainty.  But out of the 20 dinners I was involved in over the Holiday season, I had trouble with reservations on 18 of them.  This means that, on the first attempt, the restaurant I was trying to book for a holiday party for social engagements would not accept the reservation due to competing holiday celebrations.  I would have to make a few calls, and in all the cases, I could get a hold of somebody to overcome the apprehension.  But with that process, I also received an explanation that ticked me off.  It’s a trend toward the negative that I have been pointing out to everyone over these last few years, coming out of all the dumb COVID protocols.  That globalist poison attacked our American workforce, and now, under four years of Joe Biden, the impact on the average American worker has destroyed them to such a degree that it was showing up in restaurants and how they staff and handle their employees regarding pressure.  In all 18 cases I mentioned, the general managers explained that they were having difficulty staffing their businesses, especially their kitchens, and were very concerned about overloading them because they were afraid they might quit. 

My idea of a great restaurant is Gordan Ramsey’s signature restaurant in Chelsea, England, just to the south of London along the river.  There are a few great places in the world that I also think about regarding top-tier food.  A steakhouse in Kobe, Japan that specializes in Kobe steak, which is fantastic on every bar you measure.  But that 3 Michelin Star Chef Ramsey place in London is, I think, about as good as it gets.  They know how to prepare food and treat a customer.  And it is hard to make a reservation there.  They purposely have a tiny dining room because they are concerned about the high food quality.  It is an excellent experience if you ever get a chance to go, and it’s costly but well worth the money.  When I was there, they toured me through the kitchen, and I could see how things work behind the scenes, and it was all top-notch.  The workforce was clean, engaged, organized, and efficient.  I can say that I’ve seen the best in the world and understand what it takes to be that way.  That was why I could call shenanigans to many of these local managers in the Cincinnati area when they tried to tell me that they were hesitant to book reservations for fear that their staff might be overworked and start delivering poor food quality.  That was the case in one particularly dumb explanation: a very nice restaurant on the Ohio River overlooking downtown Cincinnati was almost empty on the night that I wanted to entertain guests, yet they were concerned about booking my reservation for more than 20 because they had during that same hour a party of 15 and a party of 10.   

After further probing, I got to the heart of the matter: many people who work in restaurant kitchens doing fine food have become very sensitive to pressure under the Biden administration and the COVID protocols that never disappeared.  While high-quality restaurants were able to hire those kinds of people, their ability to handle stress is much lower than they were just a few years ago, and if pressured in an environment where the demands were intense, these employees were prone to walk off the job rather than fight through the pressure.  So managers of nice restaurants were doing their best to keep that pressure off their kitchens in a rock, paper, scissors game of at least keeping the food quality high, even if it meant a loss of sales at the door.  Cincinnati and areas around the city, especially up in West Chester and Liberty Township, have restaurants that are as good as anywhere in the world, so I understand wanting to keep those high food quality standards by taking the pressure off the kitchen staff.  But the kitchen staff shouldn’t be such crybabies, either.  This was a big problem in my eyes because it’s not just restaurants; this is a major domestic service problem that is the direct result of bad government management by introducing minimum wage increases that were not market-driven and creating workforce shortages with government talk of universal wages and work from home policies of virus management introduced by socialist health departments.  It had taken a few years to get there, but the Biden administration policies had shown up in the reservation systems of high-quality restaurants. The artificial constraint of employees had impacted their businesses to the point where they couldn’t plan to maximize their dining room seating to maximum effect because their staff had become soft and unable to manage high amounts of stress. 

Knowing all this and keeping the managers happy with their dilemma, my approach was to let everyone take two or three hours for dinner so that the kitchens didn’t get stressed out too much and to allow the food quality to be reduced.  My logic to the managers is that they’ll make more money letting their guests wait for the food and buying appetizers and drinks than in trying to pace everything to the artificial constraint of the kitchen staff that was trying to figure out if they’d work that night or call off to play Call of Duty.  If employees are getting paid anyway, why would they work harder?  That is what happens when you take away incentives from the American worker to do more and to do it faster.  Most of these restaurants in Cincinnati are built for speed and large crowds.  This is not like Chef Ramsey’s restaurant in England, which had a purposely small dining room.  The places I was going to were meant to fill every seat, and if they could fit in a reservation, they could book it and keep their dining rooms full.  They needed to push their kitchens to perform.  However, “push” became a bad name under the Biden administration.  Employees have become radicalized and are “pushing back” by saying that they need an emotional safety animal to manage stress so they don’t cry when the pressure becomes too great for them.  The way I think, this is a national security issue.  You don’t see this from workforces when I travel around Asia.  They work hard. In the West, workers don’t work hard anymore, a change from just a few years ago.  Like I said, I do this kind of thing every year.  This year was the first time that I had reservations turned down on nights when the dining rooms were mostly empty, but the managers were purposefully trying to keep the pressure off their kitchens because their employees had become emotionally soft after four years of the Biden administration, and globalism employment practices in general.  And it’s certainly something we need to address as a nation.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Don’t Fight On Ground The Enemy Chooses: The sunbathing wife, never forget, government made Covid-19

Don’t Die on the Hill They Choose for You

Notice how we don’t talk about the minimum wage being $15 an hour anymore?  You could hear how Biden spun the news of the jobs report on the first Friday of November 2021, when 500,000 jobs were added. Many of them at higher wage rates because the government first destroyed those jobs with Covid protocols, then paid people to stay home, forcing employers to throw money at new hires to get them back out of the house and into the workplace.  All the aspects of the jobs report were the effect of government tampering.  Those jobs had been there before, they weren’t new, but government activism created all the elements they reported. That’s the game we are playing with these characters, and it’s essential to understand because essentially, the root of all this evil was the creation of Covid-19 by Dr. Fauci in a Wuhan lab in China to destroy our economy to cause the Great Reset we see the United  Nations pushing for.  It’s hard for most people to understand this game, so these authoritarian governments keep doing it.  They attack us on the ground they establish then force us to defend our position while attacking from a different direction.  Progressives in government have been pushing for a $15 minimum wage for a long time, but they couldn’t get the politics and public behind it.  So they attacked from a different direction using this United Nations Great Reset as the platform.  They simply took away the workers using Covid, forcing companies trying to stay alive to throw money at the situation just to try to get back to normal.  Nothing changed in the marketplace, but the government tampered with the employer/employee relationship to drive up prices so that Biden could take credit for the wage increases at some future time when he needed a political boost after the embarrassments of the Virginia election.

It’s like the poor sap of a husband who wants to watch football on a Saturday afternoon. He’s tired and has been looking forward to just sitting on the couch watching several big college games.  But his wife has other ideas.  She wants to be noticed by the next-door neighbors as she suns herself under a September sun.  She doesn’t necessarily want to have an affair with her neighbor, but she wants to make his wife jealous because the two women have a rivalry, and she likes to be noticed.  After all, her husband doesn’t seem to notice her anymore because he just wants to watch football all the time.  But she can’t lay out in the sun if the grass looks all scraggly.  So she tells her husband to go out and mow it.  He, of course, doesn’t want to.  So to get him to move off his position, she says to him, “don’t you love me anymore?  Are you cheating on me?” Well, this gets his attention.  Of course, he’s not cheating on her, but now he has to prove that he’s not, so he immediately gets defensive and feels he has to prove it to her.  Thus, shortly after some tense exchanges of denial, he goes out into the garage and starts up the lawnmower, and proceeds to cut the lawn.  The wife smiles and puts on her bikini and some sunscreen.  That, in many ways, is what the government did to us over the minimum wage. 

What the Other Hand

I tell that story because there is more to it.  Remember, our government, funded by NIH, created Covid, and our government is currently covering it up.  Dr. Fauci is just the bag man.  Covid-19 was designed to usher in the Great Reset, which the United Nations has planned for years.  How else were they going to shut down all the economies of the world so they could then gain control of them all at the same time?  Covid was their created crisis to make it happen.  You could tell it was a phony deal from the start because all the Covid protocols they wanted us to implement were the same ones that climate change lunatics wanted.

Bill Gates wants a zero-emission world, so people like him came up with the Great Reset scheme.  We know the rest of the history, and we understand this bizarre push for government-sanctioned vaccines and connecting them to our jobs.  But be careful here; there is an ulterior motive that goes well beyond the logic of what we see.  The government, represented by Biden here, understands what they are up to while the rest of us do not.  We assume that they want us to work at our jobs and be productive.  But honestly, they will make up jobs numbers all day long, just as they did on the one in November.  What they want is to make the United Nations happy with wealth redistribution.  If they can piss people off and force those who refuse to get the Covid vaccine for a virus they created in a Wuhan lab (never forget that), they can attack businesses and force them to relocate in regions of the world where people won’t walk off the job.  Remember, the wife wants the grass cut so she can flirt with the neighbor.  She could care less what her husband thought. 

The government provoking a fight between the employer and the employees is just what they want as they make deals with the United Nations to redistribute the wealth of America to places they think is better.  That is undoubtedly what Biden wants, and his administration is committed to the Open Society George Soros ideas at every level.  All these climate radicals have the United States targeted for destruction.  If they can shut down jobs over the Covid vaccine mandate, they surely will, and they’ll laugh while they are doing it.  It’s what they want.  Our mistake is in answering the wife who is accusing you of what she is actually up to.  But we are the ones mowing the grass while she is putting on the suntan oil and shaving her legs for max appeal on her sunbathing fantasies.  The government has positioned itself to win on the vaccine mandate issue either way it goes.  So don’t take the bait and fight them where they attack.  For instance, learn from history, from what they have done with the minimum wage, and hit them where you see fit.  Challenge these losers in court, attack them where they are weakest. Don’t play their game; make them play the one you demand. 

The husband should tell the wife that he’ll mow the grass after the game or even tomorrow.  When she accuses him of cheating, he should turn it around on her by letting her wonder if maybe he is.  He should know what kind of game she is playing and play it better than her. Perhaps he should say, “how did you find out?” That would turn things around on her quickly.  Then instead of putting on her bikini and suntan lotion, she’d be digging through the trash looking for unusual receipts and rummaging through his phone for unknown phone numbers.

Meanwhile, he would still get to watch the game.  Of course, she would find nothing, but he would get his game in, then he could mow the grass, and by then, the sun would be down over the horizon denying his wife the noonday sun and the lustful gaze of their neighbor.  Never let anybody, not a spouse nor a government, fight you on the ground they choose if you can help it.  Also, turn it around on them and force them to fight where you decide. It’s the foundation of the Art of War, it’s indeed the game we are all playing with China, but our government is crooked, deceitful, and out for blood.  Be sure not to walk into their buzz saw and to die on the hill they decide.  Hit them where they are vulnerable, and don’t be a sucker. Remember what we aren’t talking about when it comes to vaccine requirements, that government made the virus, Dr. Fauci knew about it, he lied to congress and the President, and a lot of people knew about it before January 28th 2020.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Jeff Bezos and His $15 An Hour Minimum Wage at Amazon: American workers have Donald J. Trump to thank and nobody else

Before anybody takes credit for Jeff Bezos of Amazon starting the initiative to pay all his employees a minimum of $15 per hour, we have to get a few things straight. It must be remembered that all this time, through all the Obama years, and the Bush years Jeff Bezos as the new richest man in the world thought he had the economy figured out. Nobody in their right mind—except for maybe me—thought that the American economy would ever see more than 4% GDP growth again. Those same people never thought unemployment would dip down to 3% in America either—because the manufacturing jobs had left the continent forever. That meant that if you had a job in the United States, that you should feel lucky that your employer paid you whatever they could. Bezos the big liberal thought he could use that situation to his advantage and hold his wages down to build his company into one of the most successful in the entire world—which he did. But like a typical Scooby Doo villain from that classic Hanna Barbera cartoon, Bezos found himself thwarted by the election of Donald Trump. Trump from the perspective of liberals who wanted to hold down the American economy and push business overseas to impoverished regions, like China and Africa, was going to make America great again, and that meant the economy was coming back and that jobs were going to bloom like flowers on a spring in the Midwest, and that places like Amazon were suddenly going to have to fight to keep their workforces intact if they wanted to maintain their global market dominance as a retail supplier.

Bernie Sanders and his Seattle socialists may want to credit themselves for putting pressure on Amazon to change their ways and move their minimum wage to the $15 an hour that has been demanded by those left leaning radicals. Tucker Carlson from Fox News has done much the same ironically, but it wasn’t any of those groups that pushed Bezos into the abyss, it was market competition. It’s what Donald Trump had been saying all through the campaign of 2016 when he said he wanted to be the greatest jobs president in the history of the world, this is what he meant. By lowering the unemployment rate it forces competition between companies for the best workers, and Amazon looked at how things were shaping up and he didn’t want to put his company at risk with high turnover from a strong American market, so he had to compromise. That is why he decided to make the move he did. It was because of President Trump. The number of $15 an hour is simply to try to appease the socialists who have been screaming for that wage level for a long time. Bezos probably figures that it will give him a competitive advantage over other employers for a while to set such a high minimum wage.

But don’t think for a second that Bezos had been rooting for Donald Trump to be successful, in fact the Amazon leader has been doing everything he could to destroy the Trump presidency before something like this very strong economy became a fact. Like many big corporations who long ago accepted the Bush-era New World Order where the United Nations would take over the management of human affairs, they put their bets in that corner and all their company assets then here comes Donald Trump talking about undoing it all. So of course, they got caught flat-footed after his election, and of course they wanted to defend themselves. But then again, they never should have bet against America in the first place. They had not just bet a few horses on the great race of politics, but they had bet the whole family farm and now they have to find a way to survive as Trump’s economy is poised to be the worlds most powerful for the foreseeable future.

I keep hearing about how patient the Chinese are and how superior they are to American strategies. Well, if they are so good, why do they have to steal all our intellectual material to attempt to compete? The truth is that the Chinese are not so great, they are a communist country filled with people who have individually been crushed. They are a society that has lost their individual imaginations and surrendered them to a collective consciousness. That makes them great workers, but not so great in the realm of thinking. So as a country they can only thrive if the rest of the world is artificially held down, as they had been during the last three American presidents, until Trump put a stop to the practice. Now that the big tech companies like Apple have to deal with jobs coming back to America—which was not on any consultant’s list of objectives in the near future, the strategy of everything has to change and workers can thank Donald J. Trump for that, and the people who have supported him. I can say that I knew all along what would happen if an American president had created an “America First” policy. But nobody was listening, so I put my support early on behind Donald Trump for this very reason, that by strengthening the economy all other troubles would suddenly be manageable around the world.

When a big, giant company like Amazon has to make concessions to keep their employees, especially when Bezos fought so hard to eliminate that competition by backing policies that would help destroy the American economy for a more global view, you can then know that America as a superpower has a new day to enjoy. But this time there aren’t any other superpowers to compete with because virtually every other country in the world has invested into this global scheme which suddenly has no value. It is a fascinating problem to observe. But nobody deserves credit for what Bezos has done but Donald Trump. Trump has won and fulfilled his promises and the average American worker is seeing the direct benefits, not just from the tax cuts, but in wage growth.

When people say that the tax cuts were for the rich, this is how they were wrong. Tax cuts for corporations and the upper crust wealthy has kept them in America. By staying in America, they now have to compete with all other industries for the same jobs. That means the average worker can demand more income as a result, it’s the basic law of supply and demand. Business owners were able to absorb those additional costs because of the tax cuts. Do you see now the magic dear reader? It’s basic economics 101—the kind of stuff you get in the first week of your first year of college economics. Yet nobody was following the rules but the billionaire from Queens, New York. He knew the obvious and was bold enough to stick to the formula and now the benefits are there for everyone to enjoy, except for the richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos. In the end if you can’t beat them, you join them, and that is how Trump is uniting the world—by being the best and forcing even the most reluctant to join him at the party. And the people who benefit most is the American worker.

I don’t like Jeff Bezos in a political way.  But I do love him as a visionary.  Welcome to the Trump Club, Jeff!

Rich Hoffman

Sign up for Second Call Defense here: http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707 Use my name to get added benefits.